I love getting physical games - reading through a colorful manual with lots of incidental game art, a cartridge/disc that I can reliably expect to use long after the console it runs on stops being supported, and which I can lend out or sell however I like.
But tell me, how many of those are still true of physical releases these days? Manuals got the penny-pinching axe around the same time as strategy guides, now you're lucky to even so much as a legal leaflet telling you not to sue if you eat the cartridge or something. Heck, we don't even get digital manuals anymore! New PS5 and XSX discs often still require online connections since the game isn't actually on the disc anymore and needs to be downloaded anyway. Even Switch cartridges often require downloaded updates to play them. If a physical cart is as reliant on a server connection as a digital release, doesn't save any space on your hard drive, and doesn't come with physical extras, then what am I even doing here?
It's still fun to own a game I can put on a shelf, but it feels like the always-online future we pushed back against at the dawn of the previous generation has come to pass gradually with no fanfare anyway. As a result, physical games have suffered a death my a thousand cuts. What does it mean when I can expect a digital purchase on Steam to be more reliable and flexible than buying a Switch cartridge?
We have boutique labels for physical games these days, which do fix many of these problems, but introduce many new ones. Recently, LRG re-released some 3DO games burned onto cheap CD-Rs that don't even work on most systems. Even for the ones which do work, you still need to be quick/lucky enough to snag them up before they're sold out, and aftermarket copies necessarily become collector's items.
I desperately want physical releases to give me a reason to buy them again, but it's been pretty difficult to care lately versus just buying a game on Steam. Anyone else feel this way?
A lot of people have said "oh you don't need manuals anymore, all games teach you everything you need to know", but there have been dozens of cases in the past several years where a game just doesn't explain some semi-obscure secondary mechanic and I was left scrambling to find a digital manual, only to find a PDF with a legal disclaimer and a button mapping JPG.
A good manual still solves this problem, and does so with great art, flavor text, and even progress hints! Bless you Tunic for actually making a great colorful manual, even if it is encoded in an imaginary moon language
